Publishing Open Access

Ready to publish? Authors can make their works Open Access through several avenues:

  • Self-Archive: Upload a copy of their work in a subject or institutional repository. DASH (Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard) is Harvard's institutional repository.
  • Publish in a fully OA journal: These journals are not subscription-based, but instead, get financial support by asking authors to pay Article Processing Charges (APC), or are funded by scholarly associations or institutional funds.
  • Publish in a Hybrid OA journal:These journals operate using a subscription-based model but do give authors an option to choose to pay an APC to make their work available open access.

Contact Countway Library Publishing & Data Services team for help with selecting a journal and/or manuscript preparation.

Preprints

Typical publishing workflow for an academic journal article: Rounds of drafting & informal feedback lead to a Preprint, which can be a work in progress or a submitted version. It can always be shared in a green OA repository at any time. After journal submission, peer review, and author correction, there is a Postprint, which is an author-accepted manuscript (AAM). It can always bed shared in a green OA repository after acceptance by a journal (sometimes after embargo). After it is copy-edited, typeset, and formatted, the article is published, resulting in the version on record via PDF/HTML/XML and the DOI from the journal. This can usually only be shared if published by a gold OA or hybrid journal.Preprint repositories provide an opportunity to share manuscripts and working papers prior journal publication.

  • Preprint repositories allow researchers to deposit, discover and disseminate scholarship in the early stages of the the research process
  • Preprint manuscripts have not yet gone through the traditional publisher-based peer-review system
  • Major preprint servers include a feedback forum permitting scholars to offer comments, reviews and transparently evaluate preprint manuscripts collectively online

Image: Thomas Shafee. "Typical publishing workflow for an academic journal article." Shared under CC-BY License.

Selected Preprint Repositories for Health Science, Biomedical & Social Science research:

  • bioRxiv: A free online archive and distribution service for preprints in the life sciences and operated by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.
  • medRxiv: A free online archive and distribution server for complete but unpublished manuscripts in the medical, clinical, and related health sciences.
  • arXiv: Containing scholarly articles in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics.
  • SSRN: Preprint repository representing disciplines across the full research spectrum, including the applied sciences, health sciences, humanities, life sciences, physical sciences, and social sciences.

Read more about preprints from Countway Library Open Access Publishing.